madcow
Loving the herd life
We just lost Pepper, a 1-year-old doe. We had called the vet out to treat her when she went down. He said that barber pole worms are epidemic this year with all the wet weather we had earlier in the spring and summer here in Texas. Your goats can look perfectly healthy, bouncy, slick coats, eating, and within hours they can be gone, not just one at a time, but several. Once infested with barber pole worms they get to critical mass with hatching (females lay up to 10,000 eggs!) and once they reach that proportion they suck the blood out of the host so fast there isn't any way to survive the infestation and it will kill them in a matter of hours. We ran into a man at the feed store the same day this was diagnosed and he "had" a herd of 600 goats and within the last month he has lost 200, all to barber pole worms! They were dying so fast he couldn't keep up with burying them and he had been treating them for that parasite to no avail. Once one is diagnosed with this parasite you can be assured a large portion of your herd is infested, too. Once they go down with this parasite they rarely survive. Checking the eyelids for anemia is good, but even better is checking the gums, especially the toothless area above the front teeth for color as an indicator of anemia. The remainder of our goats looked perfectly healthy, but after looking at their gums I was horrified at how anemic they were! It was downright scary. I ran to TSC and got Cydectin and dosed them all and will do so again in 2 weeks and 4 weeks because of remaining eggs hatching out to start the cycle all again. I just pray that their blood counts stay level or improve meanwhile, but there isn't any guarantee that any of them will make it and I'm just holding my breath everyday that we caught it in time. My goats have a little advantage in that they are dry lotted and don't browse as much as pastured goats and that cuts down on the rate of infestation, but it seems they are still at a huge risk. I just pray that we caught it in time to save the rest! Scary stuff!
sorry you lost one and I hope the rest of your goats will be ok.
We have almost lost quite a few sheep to barber pole this year and are still struggling with getting them back to healthy after two weeks of battling the invisible beasts. Plus once they are wormy they get susceptible to every other health problem on earth... Hoping you can get the rest of your herd treated and that they will bounce back quickly!!
